Reg Cook, French teacher and careers adviser at Gisborne Boys’ High School (and father of now-retired science teacher Don Cook), suggested to Ted Skuse that his future might be in law.
To Ted’s knowledge, none of his forebears had been a lawyer, but he had experienced hard physical work during school holidays from the age of 13 in brother Roy’s scrubcutting gang and did not fancy it as a long-term occupation.
“It was good training for Roy’s boxing (he was New Zealand amateur middleweight champion) and I was fit enough to do it, but I remembered the older men getting up with groans and moans, and I made myself a promise that I wouldn’t be doing that sort of work in my 50s.”
Ted went to Victoria University of Wellington, had a year at the University of Canterbury and then returned to Victoria to finish his studies. He was admitted to the bar when he was 23, was arguing cases in Perth courtrooms before his 25th birthday and was a partner in a practice in Darwin at 27.
Then Cyclone Tracy struck on Christmas Day, 1974. It killed 71 people and destroyed over 70 percent of Darwin’s buildings, including 80 percent of its homes. Over 30,000 of the city’s population of 47,000 were evacuated and many never returned. The city was effectively rebuilt within three years.
Dean Mildren, founding principal of the practice and later a Judge of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, wanted to keep the partnership together. As Darwin had been depopulated, he sent Ted — not yet 30 — to Alice Springs to open a branch of the practice.
The partnership split up in 1979, but Ted continued in Alice Springs as a sole practitioner.
“I was in Alice Springs for 12½ years . . . an outback lawyer doing everything that came in the door. It was a great learning experience because you weren’t specialised.”
Early in his Alice Springs stay, on May 22, 1975, he was shot in the back while appearing in the Supreme Court. His wife Annette had given birth to their daughter Natalie six weeks before.
“The gunman had a grudge against a lawyer,” Ted said.
“I was in a wig and gown and had my back to him — never take your eye off an armed man. Had I been facing him and taken off my wig, he would have recognised me . . . I had represented him.
“The bullet went through the right shoulder blade diagonally and came out of the middle of my chest. It missed the aorta by a centimetre.
“I lost five pints of blood. Fortunately my adversary, the prosecutor, commandeered a public vehicle and I was in hospital within five minutes. They immediately put in a drain, otherwise I’d have drowned in my own blood. Without blood transfusions I would have died, and the care was good.”
Further challenges lay ahead.
Ted took action against the court, seeking damages for negligence for failure to maintain a safe place of work.
“We lost in the Supreme Court,” he said.
“We appealed in the Federal Court and were refused leave to appeal in the High Court. We’d started the process about 1980 and started to try the case in 1985. The decision was released in 1986, and they pursued me for costs of $30,000.”
Ted felt it was time for a change of scenery, and in 1987 wound up his practice and moved from Alice Springs to Mudgeeraba, a town and suburb in the City of Gold Coast in Queensland.
“I left Alice Springs as an economic refugee, because I thought I was a sitting duck. I wanted to go to some place where they could see the injustice of it.
“I got over to Queensland and they were horrified at the story. The law society there lobbied the Government to waive this penalty against me, and eventually the Government did.”
He is still in Mudgeeraba, still practising law.
“As you get on, you specialise and aim for less stressful work. I represent senior people, and do wills and estates. I also have a specialty, along with 40 others in the state, of doing what court registrars used to do. We assess court costs.
“The costs process had been taking longer and costing more than the entire trial process. They handed it over to the legal profession, and we’ve been doing it since last century. Because of our experience in law, we know how long a case should take.”
From 1986, Ted Skuse has had a sideline of writing novels. He has completed a trilogy: Killing Season, Transformed and Standfast.
The first book was informed by what he saw as a breakdown of Aboriginal culture in Alice Springs, by his ear for the way people spoke, and by his conviction that to move the story along authentically, at least 50 percent of the text must be in direct speech.
Ted surveyed readers on who they would like to read about next, and the favoured character was the “black tracker”, a man with almost magical powers of tracking, brought in by the police to help the investigation in Killing Season. He duly featured in the remaining books of the trilogy.
Ted said Transformed was a psychological drama and Standfast was inspired by John Mulgan’s New Zealand classic novel Man Alone.
The books in the trilogy, plus two volumes of Poems from Down Under, can be found by googling “Amazon, Ted Skuse”.
Ted is also a teacher of religious instruction. If their parents “opt in”, children at primary schools in Queensland are entitled to half an hour of religious instruction a week.
“I write plays for the children to act out,” he said.
“Everything is connected to everything else. I need a paid assistant to organise my life. I have hung up my quill, but I can’t really give up law, which finances everything else I do. I am going to wear out, not rust out.”
